


Shiver

by thesearchforbluejello



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Horror, but it's really not that scary, it's just creepy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 07:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13290453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: "She tries to convince herself that she imagined it. She almost succeeds."





	Shiver

**Author's Note:**

> The biggest of thanks to klugtiger, who beta'ed this and put up with the fact that I basically disappeared for a week. She's the real MVP, and any mistakes are definitely my own.

The morning is uneventful, a towering pile of padds and a cup of tepid coffee the only things that require Janeway's attention. The first wisps of a nebula drift by her ready room viewport, strands and filaments of yellow and blue reaching out curiously toward Voyager as she approaches. 

They've allotted ten hours for a survey of the nebula before resuming their course.

The filaments grow wider and bolder, stroking against Voyager's hull in a caress of motion rather than matter. Janeway takes a habitual sip of her coffee, grimacing, having forgotten it had gone cold. 

She feels a shiver, like the sensation of someone walking over her grave. Evanescent and intangible, but enough to stir the hairs on the back of her neck as though a faint breeze had passed over her skin. 

She sets down the padd, uneasy.

Wisps of color and light drift past outside the viewport. In the distance, the pinprick lights of stars. 

She hears a faint shudder. A slight creak. She turns in her chair as if looking at the bulkhead behind her will yield answers. It doesn't.

She recycles her coffee before exiting onto the bridge.

***

Chakotay has replicated soup and soft rolls for tonight's dinner, and they eat in companionable silence once the talk of ship's business has been retired. She pulls away a piece of bread from the rim of the crust. It's halfway to her mouth, pinched between her fingers, when she pauses.

"What?" Chakotay asks.

"Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Her piece of bread discarded on her plate, she rises to her feet. She hears it again, a faint shudder, a creaking in the ship's metal. A hollow, metallic, reverberating pop.

"You didn't hear that?" She's standing by the viewportand she can see her own reflection mirrored back at her, eyes blue in the striated light of the nebula.

"No...?"

She turns away and settles back down to dinner. But every noise in the hallway, every muffled and indistinct voice of a passing crewman or chirp of a neighboring door causes her to jump.

"Are you alright, Kathryn?" he finally asks, studying her.

"I'm fine," she says, pressing her palm to her forehead. "I think I should start drinking decaf in the afternoon," she jokes, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes.

***

It's in her quarters that she hears it. A tapping on the external bulkhead. Once, then twice. It startles her, and then the prickling sense of fear she'd felt in her ready room that afternoon returns. The hairs on the back of her neck stir and the faint motion of the recycled air chills her hot skin.

With foreboding steps she approaches the viewport. She sees only the swirling eddies of the nebula. She turns back to her couch, but then she hears it again. Once. Twice. Three times. Louder.

She freezes, dread and fear mixing in a cold pool in her gut. There's only silence. She's caught in place for a moment before she flees to her bedroom.

***

She tries to convince herself that she imagined it. She almost succeeds.

The lights are out and she's almost asleep when she feels its presence. She opens her eyes into the darkness.

It's tall and slender, a natural leanness accentuated by an emaciated frame, ribs standing out in stark contrast against a tight hide. Its joints are knobby, almost bulbous, a foul sort of asymmetry in their articulation erasing any comedy in their oversized appearance. There are skeletal fingers wrapped around the doorframe, the curve of every bone illuminated in the shallow light. There are fingernails, jagged and broken flat at the tips of the fingers, gripping into the metal so tightly she thinks they'll leave a mark. 

Each footstep makes a sound, a soft brush against the carpet as the foot falls, heel to toe. She can't see its face as it approaches. She's paralyzed, powerless to scream or to run or to fight against this horrid intruder. It crawls onto the bed, over the covers, a knee and then a hand and then a knee and then a hand. The bed does not dip under its weight and she knows then that this creature does not exist as she does. 

It seems smaller as it crawls over her, its feet aligned with hers, knees aligned with hers, stretching up until its face is above hers. She cannot see its features. Her heart is beating wildly but she cannot breathe.

Its face touches hers and she doesn't feel skin, but rather a searing, blistering, burning heat. Her throat strains to scream as it sinks into her, feet into feet and hands into hands and face into face and she fades into the scorching heat.

***

She stumbles out of her quarters, her uniform hastily pulled on, errant hairs pasted to her forehead and neck, belying a faint sheen of perspiration.

She walks to astrometrics, the motion of placing one foot in front of the other a lulling, rocking pattern. She walks in a daze, her feet carrying her without her conscious will.

The console is cool beneath her fingertips as she types in a series of commands, programming the sensor array. There is a disconnect; she hears sounds structured into patterns that must be words, faint but foul, a ghost of a taste on her tongue of something awful, like a smell in the air that she's breathed in through parted lips.

The door opens behind her, but she cannot turn to look. Her eyes are on the console, even if she wants to see who’s entered.

"Kathryn, what are you doing? I got an alert from gamma shift saying that the sensor sweeps were being redirected."

She tries to turn to look at him, to answer him; she strains her neck but her eyes stay fixed on the console, watching the readouts scroll by.

"Kathryn?"

Her eyes find the nebula displayed on the screen, whorls and eddies and fingers of color. It is in place of something, she feels, and a tide of drowning, consuming rage and unbounded grief rises to burn hot and thick and poisonous in her chest. 

She hits the floor and her body writhes against the fire. She hears Chakotay's voice, dimly, calling, calling, and she tries to hold on to it but it slips away like sand through her fingers.

***

Someone's got ahold of her arms, pinned behind her, pressing her face into the carpet, and she's screaming, screaming herself hoarse, and words are dripping off her tongue and from her lips, words that are ancient and long unused and that she doesn't understand. They burn in her throat and she gags and chokes on them and screams into the floor. 

She feels it fighting her, a pseudo-physical sensation of being rent apart, the creature forcing itself out through her chest, expanding her ribs until they crack, crushing her lungs with its weight.

And then it subsides, disappearing in a flood. She can feel the fibers of the carpet beneath her cheek. Her shoulders ache tremendously from fighting the hold someone has on her arms. Her mouth is dry and her throat is raw and she sighs against the floor, her body relaxing of its own accord.

It slams back into her, arching her back and almost tearing her arms from the grip of those holding her, straining her shoulders and her back and her mind until the pain is all she can feel. She begs, but the words come out wrong, in a language she doesn't know; they're words that sound like the slime creeping its way down the walls of shadowed, shattered ruins, the dark places where the light never touched in the bowels of an old city that time and the universe had long since dissolved to atoms, dispersed for kinder, more hopeful things.

It's strangling her, squeezing and constricting and she pants in short breaths that do nothing to sate her body's need for air. She tries to suck in a breath through her nose, but it smells like blood and it tastes like blood, and the inside of her mouth is suddenly coated in copper and rust and she coughs it out onto the carpet.

Something is suddenly shoved down below the collar of her uniform and the hands release her. Her body won't obey any command to move. There's a jolt that jerks her to her side, and she stills. Hands turn her onto her back. She breathes quickly, shallow breaths sucked through dry, parted lips. The ceiling lights swim and she feels like she's burning. The foul words bubble up and back down as though they're surfacing through the thick film of a viscous liquid.

The jolt comes again, and then silence. The foul words are gone. She doesn't breathe, but she waits. The ceiling lights swim in lazy, languid patterns above her. There's a noise, insistent and concerning, and then another jolt that twitches her against the floor. She fades into a dark less terrifying.

***

She wakes to a ceiling she doesn't immediately recognize. Panic sears in her chest; she rolls over, falling from whatever she's been laying on. Stars swim over gray as her head strikes the floor. She flounders, trying to discern which direction is up. Hands, then, on her arms, holding her down. She fights and he holds her steady. His face swims above her and she blinks forcibly to bring it into focus. Dark, gentle eyes fixed on hers. A brow knit in concern, twisting lines of ink into a less graceful curve. Shadows bruised beneath his eyes. A word, repeated, etched onto the bow of his lips like a tolling sigh, over and over until she hears it and understands it for what it is and what it means. 

"Kathryn."

Her exhalation is somewhere between a sob and a sigh, and she rolls so that her forehead is pressed into the floor, her body drawn into a ball digging her knees into the carpet of sickbay. She clutches his hand to her chest with both of her own, her grip so tight it aches and bruises them both.

He kneels beside her, her side pressed against his knees, and he traces meandering patterns along her spine with a flat palm as she gasps and breathes and shivers.

"It's gone," he says. "It's gone. It's gone."

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written horror before-- let me know how I did!


End file.
